The decade of the 2020s started with ACT being dark for the entire 2020 mainstage season. While closed
for the pandemic, there was a change in leadership as Anita Shah moved in as Managing Director. The
first play after the pandemic closure was Hotter Than Egypt, written by Core Company member Yussef el Guindi
- a world premiere.
productions
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1984
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Amadeus (1984)
The Communication Cord (1984)
Brian Friel takes us to the remote Irish town of Ballybeg for this often-hilarious story of a young man trying to impress his girlfriend’s father. The father is a pompous senator with a romantic attachment to the “auld" Ireland; he and a variety of other eccentric characters threaten the young man’s well-planned weekend.
The Communication Cord was first produced by the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Ireland, in September of 1982, two years after its companion piece, Translations. ACT is pleased to present its American premiere.
Top Girls (1984)
A modern businesswoman celebrates her promotion to head of a London employment agency by throwing a party. Her unusual guest list includes famous and successful “top girls” from history and mythology. Playwright Caryl Churchill, whose Cloud 9 was seen here last season, proves once again that she is one of the boldest, most imaginative writers in theatre today.
Guest director Sharon Ott, who staged Educating Rita on our mainstage in ’83, will direct Top Girls. She has been Resident Director at The Milwaukee Rep for the past five years and has been named Artistic Director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where she will assume her new duties this fall.
Angels Fall (1984)
Six people are trapped in "a rehearsal for the end of the world." An accident at a nearby uranium mine has filled the air with radioactive dust and they find refuge in a sun-baked mission in New Mexico.
Lanford Wilson, author of over 30 plays, including Hot l Baltimore, seen at ACT in 1974, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly, gives us a funny, touching, and highly satisfying evening of theatre. He fills the stage with six characters who become old and valued friends.
Angels Fall will be staged by guest director Fred Chappell, Artistic Director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta for over seven years.
Thirteen (1984)
It was a much different world for a family in Queens, New York, in the 1950s. A testy grandfather and his two daughters, one of whom has a 13-year-old girl, bring to life a touching, often funny look at growing up in that time not long ago.
Fool for Love (1984)
America's most brilliant and irreverent playwright, Sam Shepard, takes us to a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert for this remarkable “modern western,” winner of the 1983/84 Off-Broadway Obie Award for Best New American Play!
Fool For Love — a pair of gunslingers, in this case a man and a woman who have been lovers for years, fighting it out with a barrage of fierce, lacerating words. Truly, this is a love story like no other, and one you won’t soon forget.